Welcome, and Stay Hopeful!

Welcome!

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Hopeful Homies! Tom and e-vaughn are just a couple of homies dedicating some solid positivity to analyzing the culture and content within, primarily, videogames. Games provide an abundant source of facets to poke and prod, and the culture is an ever-expanding, kinda complex, sometimes incendiary little beast. I mean shit, homie, surely you’ve seen the heaps of condescension, cynicism, and hell — even unabashed hatred that gets dealt out, right?

We love videogames. Games enrich our lives in so, so many ways – and yet it’s pretty easy to lose sight of just how amazing the experiences videogames provide really are. It’s a little too easy to take the grandness for granted, so we’re here to replace some of that unpleasant negativity from our culture with pure hopefulness.

Why Be Hopeful, Homie? Hope =/= Blind Faith:

Optimism =/= Excuses

Be mindful though, cuz reppin’ positivity doesn’t mean we’re turning a blind eye from the problems that may exist in videogames and game culture. Nah, nah. We’re just framing things optimistically. We’re casting a spotlight on the cracks, and doing our best to seek value in the erosion. Afterall, flaws can be beautiful. Flaws show us where to improve and focus our efforts. Mistakes can lead to guidance. When analyzed with an eye towards corrective feedback, mistakes tend to provide a much needed lesson for one’s next endeavor. Likewise, when all goes too smoothly and easily, it’s a bit harder to figure out how we can improve due to a lack of feedback. I know I’m talking pretty abstractly here, but this mentality of framing errors as learning lessons can be applied to our personal lives, the way we make our art, and how we analyze what we like about our environment, including games. Besides all that, optimism, hopefulness, and being social are damn good for you – check out our post on the science behind hopeful homies!

While negativity can be instructive, it is rarely constructive in and of itself, and negativity alone often leads straight to cynicism. In fact, at the risk of sounding negative… fuck cynicism. It’s hardly a step outside anyone’s comfort zone to claim they dislike something. Abstaining from active appreciation, acknowledging ignorance of certain media, or asserting a lack of opinion are NOT, for the most part, bold claims to make.

It takes much more courage and active participation to claim positively that you like something. In so doing, you are advocating for something, and asserting that you’d like to experience more of that thing. This assertion requires energy, it requires forming a perspective, investing time and thought, being captivated, or admitting being drawn to it for no discernible reason. Claiming to like something provides others valuable insights into your tastes and inherently associates that thing and those tastes with your character. After careful thought and analysis, us hopeful homies tend to believe there’s something to appreciate in basically every single thing! It’s not always easy, but it’s a hell of a lot more fun. For real, homie.

All this, and so much more, is what we’ll be doing here at Hopeful Homies. We are, it would seem, just a couple of hopeful homies, hoping to make a little impact on our hoppin’ industry.

Our Content:

Psychological framing

On this site, we’ll be tackling a slew of topics that have caught our fancy. You’ll see articles dedicated to gameplay mechanics, game mastery, challenge, game culture, fun, what it means to engage in rich, respectful conversation, and how to locate the value in these amazing hobbies that so many of us seem to enjoy populating our lives with. Tom and e-vaughn will be working together on a variety of game articles and incorporate our industry knowledge of user research into the mix. However, since we’re individuals with differentiating tastes, we’ve got separate areas where we’ll talk about our own topics as well. When we collaborate, we’ll try our best to differentiate ourselves by font, color, or some image we choose!

For me, e-vaughn, I’ll be incorporating my world-views about flow, progression, and psychology into many articles that I conjure up. As I’m heavily invested in a variety of hobbies and taking on challenges, I may touch on flow arts, rock climbing, skating, movies, philosophy, kendama, whatever is happening in my life at the moment, the values that make me, and romance + relationships.

For me, Tom, I’ll definitely dive into the world of social psychology as it relates to social media and online communication, the connection between technology and changing social norms, our connection with nature, competition and how sports impact our lives, and everything good in my life including friends, family, and the sigO!

Our Community:

Keep it social, keep it hopeful

It might seem like, so far, it’s all about us. Nope! At the end of every post, we’ll sign off with some variation of ‘Stay Hopeful, Homies!’ And you know what? We mean that! We’d love for y’all to join us on this wonderful journey. By staying connected with us here, and engendering truly positive and hopeful commentary (we promise, we’ll respond to comments!), we think we can all grow together. It’s not always easy staying hopeful, but it’s worth the effort, and much easier when you’ve got company.

So feel free to read articles you care about, skip the ones you don’t, and comment on anything and everything. If you see something that someone might be interested in, definitely share the post wide and far! We only ask that you keep it hopeful. When there’s absolutely no room for positivity, just steer the direction towards what can get us back on track – at least we’ll be able to talk about why it’s hard in that particular situation.

We’ll post soon about our Twitter and Reddit accounts and all that good stuff, so stay posted. And of course, Stay Hopeful, Homies!